snoqueen wrote:And we were discussing the drinking and sexual behavior among city alders. What in the world Prosser has to do with this is beyond me.

Quoting from the article linked in the OP, to which I have referred at length in my comments (so you could reasonably infer I read it several times before discussing it):

An exception was Tim Bruer, who was one of the alders with Berg and Solomon at a pair of downtown taverns on the night of April 13, 2010, after a council meeting. He spoke at length to investigators about what he saw and says now that "it's ironic that many of the progressives on the council and in the community who are fast to be calling for state officials to resign for inappropriate behavior have not come forth and applied the same principles to Ald. Solomon," referring to calls for conservative state Supreme Court Justice David Prosser to step down...

I don't agree with Bruer. I don't think these two situations are parallel at all. I don't think accusations of sexual misbehavior in a private home with nobody else present are equivalent to a witnessed misbehavior in a public place. So what Prosser's got to do with it remains beyond me, even though it might make sense to Bruer. The purpose of my comments was not to argue with Tim Bruer, who is entitled to his own opinions.

What we were discussing, starting with the top of the thread, was excessive drinking, drunk driving, and sexual behavior among city alders.

If you think the issue should be turned into "jumping to conclusions about reports of assaults" then you need to say so. And while people jump to conclusions all the time, I don't think that's a major part of the Solomon/Berg discussion. Alders have been standing aside and waiting for results of an investigation, and I, for my own part, have said while I think the whole thing is an embarrassment (to many people not just Solomon) the driving thing is the worst part and along with the assistant DA, I can't see where there's a winnable case against Brian S. I have not, therefore, tried to build a big case that he's guilty or innocent. I attempted to open a discussion of whether the activities described in Steven Elbow's article amounted to criminality, and if so at what point. That's worthy of public discussion.

So if you try and stretch this thing and make a Prosser-Solomon equivalence, what's your reasoning? You whined because you think people jumped to conclusions about Prosser and now you're whining because people won't jump to conclusions about Solomon?

snoqueen wrote:So if you try and stretch this thing and make a Prosser-Solomon equivalence, what's your reasoning? You whined because you think people jumped to conclusions about Prosser and now you're whining because people won't jump to conclusions about Solomon?

For the record, I already stated in the other thread that I think they are doing the right thing by remaining silent on the Solomon issue. As I recall I said something like "perhaps they leanred something from their Prosser gaffe".

You need to realize that the discussion is going to go where it's going to go, especially with a quote like Bruer's in the linked article.

To bastardize a famous quote - "Jason and Sno make plans, the Forum laughs"

Not to pile on to the threadjack, but I was disappointed in The Isthmus' tolerance for propaganda long before they decided to start PAYING David Blaska. I understand the notion of balance, but why would you tolerate a guy (much less PAY him) who comes on to tell your readers that the moon is made of green cheese? Newspapers publish facts and sometimes they publish opinions based upon facts. We call those "editorials." Have "blogs" officially become "articles which may or may not be opinions completely devoid of facts?"

Part of me says that it's the nature of a forum. "Truth will out." If you tell a lie, people call you on it and there's almost as much value in exposing a lie as there is in simply telling the truth from the get-go. But as Mark Twain once observed, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on." Politicians, particularly Republicans, understand this. People are likely to believe a lie if it conforms to their worldview. If FoxNews tells people that 90% of Mexicans are unemployed and living on government aid, people who hate Mexicans are going to believe that without question. And if they were told that same lie while listening to Rush Limbaugh or reading the Heritage Foundation website, it would seem as true and obvious as the law of gravity.

And that's where I have a problem with The Isthmus. It's bad enough to provide a forum to people who disseminate false information, whether that's Johnny or Ned, but to PAY someone to do so really makes you part of the problem. The same lie that readers hear on Rush will be repeated by Blaska, and the fact that they see the lie in a "liberal" periodical essentially adds credibility to the lie.